Anti-war left can make a difference only with a taste of liberal lemonade

Instead of slogans, those opposed to George Bush should start contributing ideas, writes Thomas L. Friedman.

I stood on the footpath in London the other day and watched thousands of anti-war, anti-George Bush, anti-Tony Blair protesters pass by. They chanted every anti-war slogan you could imagine and many you couldn't print. It was entertaining - but also depressing, because it was so disconnected from the day's other news.

Just a few hours earlier, terrorists in Istanbul had blown up a British-owned bank and the British consulate, killing or wounding scores of British and Turkish civilians. Yet nowhere could I find a single sign in London reading, "Osama, how many innocents did you kill today?" or "Baathists - hands off the UN and the Red Cross in Iraq".

Hey, I would have settled for "Bush and Blair equal bin Laden and Saddam" - something, anything, that acknowledged that the threats to global peace today weren't just coming from the White House and Downing Street.

Sorry, but there is something morally obtuse about holding an anti-war rally on a day when your people have been murdered - and not even mentioning it or those who perpetrated it.

Watching this scene, I couldn't help but wonder whether Bush had made the liberal left crazy. It can't see anything else in the world today, other than the Bush-Blair original sin of launching the Iraq war without UN approval or proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Believe me, being a liberal on every issue other than this war, I have great sympathy for where the left is coming from. And it would be a lot easier for the left to engage in a little postwar reconsideration if it saw even an ounce of reflection, contrition or self-criticism from conservatives such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who drove this war, yet so bungled its aftermath and so misjudged the complexity of postwar Iraq. Moreover, the Bush team is such a partisan, ideological, non-healing administration that many liberals just want to punch its lights out.

But here's why the left needs to get beyond its opposition to the war and start pitching in with its own ideas and moral support to try to make lemons into lemonade in Baghdad:

First, even though the Bush team came to this theme late in the day, this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary US democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan. The primary focus of US forces in Iraq today is erecting a decent, legitimate, tolerant, pluralistic representative government from the ground up. I don't know if we can pull this off. We got off to a bad start. But it is one of the noblest things the US has ever attempted abroad, and it is a moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best shot.

Unless we begin the long process of partnering with the Arab world to dig it out of the developmental hole it's in, this angry, frustrated region is going to spew out threats to world peace forever. The next six months in Iraq - which will determine the prospects for building democracy there - are the most important six months in US foreign policy in a long, long time. And it is way too important to leave it to the Bush team alone.

The liberal opposition to the Bush team should be from the right - to demand that we send more troops to Iraq, and more committed democracy builders, to do the job better and smarter than the Bush team has.

Second, we are seeing - from Bali to Istanbul - the birth of a virulent, nihilistic form of terrorism that seeks to kill advocates of modernism and pluralism, be they Muslims, Christians or Jews.

This terrorism started before September 11 and is growing in the darkest corners of the Muslim world. It is the most serious threat to open societies, because one more September 11 and we'll really see an erosion of our civil liberties. Only Arabs and Muslims can root out this threat, but they will do that only when they have ownership of their own lives and societies. Nurturing that is the real goal in Iraq.

"In general," says Robert Wright, author of Nonzero, "too few who opposed the war understand the gravity of the terrorism problem, and too few who favoured it understand the subtlety of the problem."

To me, the right liberal approach to Iraq is to say: we can do it better. Which is why the sign I most hungered to see in London was, "Thanks, Mr Bush. We'll take it from here."